Remembering Jimi Hendrix’s Vulnerable Side

by Sheila Weller

  

 2:15 PM, SEPTEMBER 17 2010

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From Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.

Jimi Hendrix died 40 years ago tomorrow, and, aside from a small commemoration at the park that was finally named after him in his hometown of Seattle, the public isn’t celebrating the legendary guitarist’s brief life or noting the cultural changes his music ushered in. Hendrix died of a drug overdose, so that’s one plausible reason for the lack of fanfare—we don’t see the tragedy in such endings, just its unseemliness, the moral lesson. Still, consider: like someone else we now know, Jimi Hendrix was a lithe, light-skinned African-American from a Pacific Rim state who encountered racism mostly only after his childhood (specifically, as an R&B-circuit guitarist in the deep South), found identity and success in an unlikely city (London, not Chicago), was more centrist than people expected (though his views would eventually change, he initially supported the Vietnam War), briefly served in an elite patriotic body (not the U.S. Senate but the 101st Airborne), and, in a lightning-short time, so won the adulation of young white idealists, he helped spark a “post-racial” hopefulness. In front of rousing crowds, TV cameras, and a nervous security detail, he interpreted a hallowed text (not the Oath of Office but “The Star Spangled Banner”) in a way that would go down in history. Also: with his flowery poet’s shirts and jeweled vests, the curlers he used to set his hair (early on, to achieve a Dylan look), his girlish name spelling, and his delicately feminine handwriting, he was a harbinger of a trend—androgyny—that would soon be tucked into the cult of liberation. Yet as lionized as he’s been for four decades now by Wayne’s World–y suburban boys, and as clearly as he’s considered one of the greatest guitarists ever, he’s also been a bit misunderstood. History has forgotten—or never noticed—his vulnerability. Exactly a year before Jimi’s death, when I was a barely-out-of-college girl with friends who knew the late star, I spent a weekend talking to him at his rented house in upstate New York. The resulting article I wrote for Rolling Stone wound up as a key part of Hendrix lore because it was the only print article that portrayed his fragility. (His TV analogue was on the Dick Cavett Show, when he walked, pigeon-toed, to his seat and then coughed and apologized in every other sentence.) My piece, Hendrix biographers Harry Shapiro and Caesar Glebbeek wrote in their 1995 book, Electric Gypsy, “leads up to one of [Jimi’s] most famous press statements: ‘I don’t want to be a clown any more. I don’t want to be a rock ’n’ roll star.’” (Seeing that quote in my manuscript, Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner chose the first of the two sentences as the piece’s headline. Later, Joni Mitchell, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times’s chief music critic Robert Hilburn, would also note, on the basis of their friendship, “Jimi was a very genuine person, but doing all this theatrical stuff was humiliating to him.”) My little brush with history was something I hardly thought about for a very long time. But, because the people of my generation are now clutching onto our self-anointed specialness like the sides of a runaway lifeboat, it’s felt increasingly significant in the last few years—magical, even.

The things that surprised me about Jimi a month after Woodstock are even more surprising now. (1) He was little, almost frail. The iconic fish-eye-lens shot of Jimi on the cover of Are You Experienced? made him seem quite tall. In truth, Jimi was 5’11”, had a slight build, and seemed dangerously thin. (“Jimi, you never eat,” worried Linda, his videographer at the time and the girlfriend of his new musical collaborator, Juma Lewis, who would later change his name to Sultan. When I contacted my friend Linda recently, she said, “That’s right, he never ate. But at least he had the sense to take vitamins with his morning tequila.”) (2) He was self-effacing and insecure. The biggest rock star in the world kept apologizing for mumbling, kept rephrasing his sentences as if he weren’t articulate enough, didn’t think Bob Dylan remembered their one meeting, and, during a rehearsal with his new band (two Memphis blues musicians, Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell, and the progressive jazzman Juma), had asked Juma, in reference to serious avant-garde musicians, “Tell me honestly; what do those guys think of me? Do they think I’m jiving?” (3) He was a fussbudget. “I’m like a clucking old grandmother,” said the young man who famously immolated his guitar onstage, as he walked around neatening things in his house and emptying ashtrays. (4) He had unexpectedly un-rock-’n’-roll taste in music: He proudly brandished the albums of Schoenberg and Marlene Dietrich at a time when Zeppelin and the Stones and Janis Joplin were all the rage.

It sounds self-evident and lachrymose to say that the decent, deeply original young man I met that weekend was too delicate for the icon status he’d gained (and sought), and for the sloppy, naïvely unprotected way rock stars indulged their appetites in those days. (Which is not to say the rest of us weren’t prone to excess.) But it’s true. A year later, when word came of his death, it seemed belatedly obvious that he hadn’t been long for this world when I’d met him just a year before.

It saddens me that we can’t see beyond the “disgrace” of his overdose and the corny image (which he told me he longed to retire) of the satyr-guitarist feigning sex with his instrument—that we can’t get to re-know him. Drug-taking notwithstanding, life back then had an innocence to it, a constant search for an epiphany, and, though the term didn’t exist yet, a multicultural idealism that cannot be described now without sounding silly and nostalgic. And Jimi Hendrix personified this entire—dare I say it—heady sensibility. When I met him, he had just named his new band Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, and in the house during my visit he and his group were playing what he called “cosmic music.” Later in his car, with our Hair-cast mélange—Jimi, Chinese-American Linda, Juma in his African threads, the English avant-garde pianist Michael Ephron, a beautiful blue-eyed black girl named Betty who practiced Islam and whose brother went to Amherst, and the little blonde Jewish writer from Beverly Hills—all flashed the peace sign (yes, really—the peace sign!) to passing cars full of an analogous collection of wandering souls. Peel back the many years of deserved parody and understand: this was America, where a Seattle street urchin who’d used a broom as an imaginary guitar had become a paratrooper all set to fight in Vietnam, a chitlin-circuit sideman, and then a psychedelic superstar—all by the tender age of 25. There was an awesome lesson in that sweeping journey: it was a sweet time and he was a sweet man, as awed by what he had helped create as everyone around him was. In the jeweled, Moroccan journal in which I saw him take constant, feverish notes in that tender, neat calligraphy of his, Jimi had just composed a little poem about Woodstock, which Charles Cross, the best of the Hendrix biographers, later obtained and reprinted in his excellent 2005 book,Room Full of Mirrors. It read:

500,000 halos outshined the mud and history/

We washed and drank in God’s tears of joy/

And for once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery.

Rest in peace, Voodoo Child, Jimi Hendrix.

Sheila Weller, whose last piece for Vanity Fair was “Once In Love With Ali” (March 2010) is the author, most recently, of Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation.